Top Posts & Pages

Blog Stats

Meta

Cambridge Literary Festival Wrap-Up

So my brief adventure at the Cambridge Literary Festival is finally over, and I enjoyed it a lot, though I didn’t get to go to all the events that I was hoping to: the Judith Kerr talk sold out before I could get tickets, and unfortunately I couldn’t persuade anyone to go to the International Book Aid Quiz with me…

My favourite event was probably the Alex Rider 15th anniversary talk with Anthony Horowitz, and if you ever get the chance to hear him speak, then I really recommend that you do – he’s an incredibly entertaining speaker. He talked a lot about his inspiration for the books, and how he based a lot of the villains on teachers that he’d disliked at school, and the like. 🙂 Afterwards, there was a book signing, and I took along my old copy of Point Blanc, since it’s my favourite Alex Rider book. I got to have a (very) brief chat with him, too, which was a lot of fun. 😀

I was a little late to my second event – the YA talk with Sally Green and James Dawson – because the queue for Anthony Horowitz was so long, but luckily I didn’t miss all that much. The talk was rather like an informal interview, with a journalist chatting to the two of them about various different aspects of YA literature, and the audience chipping in every now and then, too. As you’ll probably know if you’ve been following this blog for a while, I’m already a huge Sally Green fan, and it was really great to hear her talk about how she came up with the idea for Half Bad; James Dawson I’d never heard of before, but he made his books sound really interesting, and I definitely want to pick up his new book, All of the Above, when it comes out later this year.

I decided to buy physical copies of Half Bad and Half Wild so that I could get them signed, and I was tempted to get one of James Dawson’s books as well, but most of his already-published books are horror, which is a genre I really don’t get on with… But they were sharing a table in the signing room, so I got to chat to them both, and I even asked Sally Green about the likelihood of a Nathan/Gabriel endgame in the Half Life trilogy – the upshot of her answer was that I’d have to wait and see (of course!), but she did agree that they were perfect for each other, so I remain hopeful. 😉

Lastly, on Sunday I went to a talk by Robert Douglas-Fairhurst about his new book, The Story of Alice, which is a biography of Lewis Carroll, the real Alice Liddell, and of Alice in Wonderland itself. The talk was interesting, and there were several good questions asked by the audience at the end. Gillian Beer (who was chairing the talk and asking questions) also read out one of Carroll’s poems – My Fairy – which I liked a lot (and you can read it online here, if you so desire), and Douglas-Fairhurst finished up with an extract from Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.

Again, I got my copy of The Story of Alice signed at the end of the talk, and I was very tempted to buy a copy of Jabberwocky and Other Nonsense (a collection of Lewis Carroll’s poetry), since they had the beautiful clothbound editions available, but unfortunately I didn’t have enough cash on me…